Professional grump Roger Lewis vents his frustrations at modern life in his bile-laden, dizzyingly misanthropic follow-up to Seasonal Suicide Notes

R
oger Lewis, the journalist, critic and biographer of, among others, Peter
Sellers (acclaimed) and Anthony Burgess (dismissed by all but a handful of
Lewis’s high-profile friends, of which he has many), is the son of a butcher
— part of a butchery dynasty, indeed — who grew up in “industrial South
Wales”, attended a local comp, went up to St Andrews and then on to Oxford,
where he became a Fellow of Wolfson College at the age of 24.

Many women whose academic fires once burnt brightly before being soused by
life seem perfectly able to retreat unfussily to the provinces and get on
with their lives. If you find yourself seated next to one at dinner, a
fellow diner may mutter, helpfully: “Did you know that Joan was a Great
Beauty, spent her first year at Oxford in bed with Martin Amis, earned the
best degree in the country and got